


The River

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Community: tww_minis, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-11
Updated: 2006-12-11
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:24:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You are the brother I knew how to love and you were the brother I was sorry to lose." Probably a story about a legacy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The River

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jamie_dakin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamie_dakin/gifts).



> Written as a back-up fic for jamie_dakin in the Sam round @ tww_minis. Set around 6.16 'Drought Conditions'.
> 
> WARNINGS for: discussion of suicide and suicidal thoughts.

You make us believe that we can outlive death / You make us for an instant, for your sake / Burn, like stretched silver of a wave / Not breaking, but about to break.  
\-- 'Beautiful, Proud Sea', Sara Teasdale

*

Toby will be in town for the funeral. Sam gets this message early on Tuesday morning, already at his desk and facing with a sigh the grim, matronly expectations of his assistant, Ms. Latimer. She is efficient and possessed of a devastating capacity for memory, but frightens him profoundly, being rather too much like his second grade teacher. (He misses Bonnie, Ginger and Mrs. Landingham every day.) She hands him a thin slip of paper with Toby's number on it and tells him that it hadn't sounded like his friend cared less if Sam called him back or not. She puts quotation marks around Toby's name when she says it, as if challenging Sam for an explanation for why she has never heard of this man who lit up Sam's eyes when she mentioned him. _An old friend_, Sam says, _from the White House_.

*

"Toby? It's me - Sam."

"Hey."

"I got your message."

"Yeah."

"So how come you're in the city?"

"I didn't know whether I should call you," Toby says. "My brother ... ah, he died. So, I'm here for a little while."

Sam swallows. "I'm sorry, Toby."

"Yes."

"You okay?" Sam asks, and immediately regrets it.

"Yeah," Toby says, too lightly. "Fine."

"You wanna have lunch?"

"Sure," Toby says, and hangs up the phone.

The restaurant is small, dim inside and loud from the street and the voice of the chef, which echoes like thunder through the space. It disturbs Sam that Toby, once inside, melts away against this back-drop, fitting to the dull shadows, his voice too often lost under the constant competing murmurs of sound. Sam wants to touch him, to make sure he is real. He listens without speaking much to Sam's stories about New York and the half-baked lie-filled explanations he gives for leaving California but not coming back to Washington. Toby's eyes are difficult to look into, too full of a deep, powerful sadness which Sam doesn't remember from before but which looks too set, too bedded-in to be entirely new; something woken then, and something nurtured.

"How're the twins?" Sam asks, alighting, not entirely by accident, on the one topic he can think of which might raise Toby from this deliberate silence which Sam is not sure is entirely due to grief.

"They're good."

"They're ... two now, is that right?"

"In a couple weeks, yeah."

"You gonna do anything special?"

Toby shakes his head. "I don't know."

"I guess Andy decides all that stuff?"

"Yeah. But I get an invite, so."

Sam nods. "Should be nice."

Toby head makes a small echo of Sam's affirmation. "Yeah."

"Do you have any pictures?" Sam asks, wondering why he has.

"Yeah," Toby says, his voice light, wondering too. He reaches into his coat pocket and brings out his thin, under-used wallet which has so much less of Toby than the thick, coffee-stained, rubber band-bound notebook of many pages which Sam can see in the gape of his shirt pocket and remembers with a fondness complicated enough to constitute mythology. Toby opens his wallet and brings out two pictures: one of the twins with Andrea, and one of the twins with their father. Andy's hair is red enough to stain the photograph - she looks away from the camera and the top right-hand corner of the badly-framed picture is full of the line of her laugh and the rich curve of her cheekbone. The boy, Huck, is sitting on her lap with his hand holding on to her shoulder; the girl, Molly, is standing behind her mom's chair, face raised to her mother's laugh and echoing it. The other picture, by contrast, looks like a photograph, rather than a memory made solid. Toby is holding both twins in his arms, also looking away from the camera but not laughing. Sam can see the discomfort in his face but the love as well, which he is carefully hiding. Both Huck and Molly are gazing at their father; the boy's hand raised to Toby's chest, the girl's head inclined so that her hair, which is long and straight and black, touches her father's face.

"They're beautiful."

"Yeah," Toby says, surprising Sam with the softness of his voice and the surety of his tone, "They are."

*

He realises that one of faith's gifts is comfort in times of death, of darkness. Toby has forgotten to step out of the dark these last few years so his eyes have no trouble adjusting to these new depths. He forms part of the company David keeps in death and watches his brother not breathing, not moving, because there is nothing else to see.

His brother David is clean-shaven. Toby, whose beard is grown long for the sake of grief, realises he has never thought about it before, and that he is glad that there is nothing extra of darkness on David's face, nothing more than the candle-flicker and tomorrow, not even that. His brother's face is naked too without his glasses, without the little, round-lensed vanity pair which made him look, he thought, like a Jewish John Lennon or the regular, thicker ones which sat heavily on his gentle, gifted features and made him what he was. The second pair is in Toby's pocket. David's hair was dark, his eyes a warm brown, his voice was sweeter and stronger and his step braver. He had diplomas on his walls from Columbia, from Cornell and a identification card from NASA in his wallet. His children are named Joseph, Miriam, Zachary. His wife is only forty-two years old. This is the song that Toby Ziegler can sing for his brother, and nowhere in it can he find the harmonics of his own loss.

The gas left no marks on him. Toby has been searching for them for hours fingering, as he searches, his unbuttoned left shirt cuff. The opening above the cuff, above the place where the buttons should meet, is made longer by the rip Toby put in it, all the way up to his elbow. The fabric is starting to fray now, from being rubbed at inside his jacket, from the worrying of his fingers. Toby starts to pick at the threads, pulling them clear. Soon there is a small snowfall of white cotton over his knees and on the floor around his feet. A man used to plucking metaphor from the air, Toby is satisfied with this small act of destruction as the expression of his grief for David: the rip made in something already cut open; the threads of that rip stroked and teased and pulled at until the whole is loose fragments, forgotten. The gas left no marks on his brother, nor the cancer either, but those marks have been written into Toby, words that have formed the break in his soul, for a very long time.

Their father is here, of course. Julie Ziegler looks old now and cold with the shock of out-living his younger son. Toby lets his dad embrace him, even puts his arms around the old man and hugs him back. His father bends to kiss his cheek and Toby bows his head, shamefully, because although he hates the touch he still has the smell of his own son's hair in his nose from two nights ago, when he held Huck close to his chest and said goodbye, for now. Huck had squirmed and cried out a little, so by the door Toby kissed his hair, then let him go, watched him run unsteadily to his sister and marvelled at the two things in his life that he is still allowed to love. Huck's hand caught at his sleeve as he turned in the doorway, as though the child wanted him to know that he didn't go alone. He had knelt in the doorway with his son and daughter and felt warm with them in his arms. If he concentrates he can still feel it: Molly's heart beating against his chest and Huck's hand fisted in his jacket sleeve. It keeps him from twisting out of his father's arms and disappearing. Toby figures Julie Ziegler could do without another disappearing son.

*

"I always wished I had a brother," Sam says, in that tone Toby remembers as the one which heralded headaches and the obligations of maturity; the times he had to tell Sam 'no'.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. An older brother, you know. Someone to look up to."

"You trying to tell me something, Sam?"

Sam smiles and Toby swallows as he remembers what beauty looks like in a man. "Maybe."

"Well, there's an opening now," Toby says, draining the last of his cold coffee and laying a twenty on the table between them. "Better get your application in quick. Before the opportunity wastes itself."

His brother David was a creature of brightness, a sunny scientist, a good son, eventually, and a good Jew always. He was in the business of smiling when he was unhappy, a coper like Toby, who gave up tears at eight years old but replaced them with sullenness, who always played best in the neighbourhood's impromptu baseball games when he was half-crazy with an anger that never seemed to go quite away. David sucked at baseball, was taller than Toby ever was when he was only fifteen but always sucked at basketball too. He liked chess, and used to bring wildlife home from Prospect Park in cleaned-out pickle jars, and show them to Toby in the kitchen gabbling half the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a high voice made breathless by the cold wind and his run home, until Toby took him by the shoulders and turned him out of the kitchen. David always twisted back in his hands and looked up at him: _don't you think this is interesting?_ And love made Toby nod, say _sure, kid_ and then David would go, smiling.

For a while it is just the two of them, after their father disappears into the night and Toby vows never to cry ever again. David makes no such vow, and it is Toby's job to wipe his tears away and think of games that might make him forget their father and keep him out of trouble on the streets and make sure he does his homework. This much his mom tells him, early in the morning in their grey kitchen, where all of the small myths of Toby's childhood seem to have been written. He stares at his mom with his chin tucked low onto his chest. Nothing seems as important as remembering his brother; nothing except forgetting his father.

Toby doesn't start getting jealous until it becomes clear that his brother doesn't need him anymore. Before David started walking on his own, Toby hadn't noticed the straight As, the easiness with people, the pattern of wins. He doesn't hate the sunshine until David shows him how or expect to lose until victory becomes a standard. And then being the one who hates seems easiest, a pattern of his own, and it is David who puts a hand on his shoulder and asks him: _what's wrong?_

*

It is late, on the banks of the river, on the second night, the day after the funeral.

Sam's place is big and warm, and exactly what Toby had expected. He sleeps on Sam's couch the first night or rather stares up at his white ceiling and listens to the rain and the noise of the city, which seems too far away. He must have slept a little because he's asleep when Sam wakes him gently, with a mug of coffee and the sound of his name, which is soft in Sam's mouth. As he goes to make the eggs which Toby is certain he won't be able to eat, Sam kneels by the couch and kisses his temple. Toby stares at him as he goes. Toby waits in the apartment while Sam goes to the office because it doesn't occur to him to do otherwise, and when Sam comes home he smiles gently and Toby thinks he sees sadness in the kid's eyes, but isn't sure. He sees sadness everywhere.

At night they walk in the city, finding the quiet places inside the noise. The river hides all the other sounds, and so that is where Toby finds his footsteps going, over again. By the river there is solitude, in Sam's light chatter there is a disguise. Sam knows he isn't listening and thinks Toby doesn't notice that he walks between Toby and the river, a body between Toby and his fall.

The river sings as Toby watches it, looking past Sam; songs he already knows. There is a spiralling in his thoughts, making him dizzy as he walks, a conflux, like many swollen rivers matched to the events of his life - the great disappointments, the shallow victories, barriers and dams and the flotsam of his ambition and understanding washed through in the water, lost in the wave. He walks unsteadily for a moment, falling a little against Sam's shoulder. The kid holds his arm, braces him. The river flows black and all Toby can hear is its bubbling commentary, like the voices of many fathers, many brothers and sons; all lost. There is only the river, running black. He realises he is crying when he hears the sharp pulls of his breath under the wind. It doesn't take much to get him to weep this week, though Toby wonders, in the small part of his mind which is still conscious and rational, where the tears are coming from. Somehow he expects them to be black on his hands, like ink, running long smudges down his face. When Sam wipes them away with his fingers, Toby blinks at the unstained whiteness of his hands. He is still blinking when Sam kisses him. His mouth is soft, gentle, warm, and the contact like all the things Toby has forgotten his understanding of, and surprise tastes like sweet, clear water in his mouth. He cannot feel the heat of Sam's body through the overcoats they are both wearing but the boy's arms come round him and his strength is as good as warmth. Toby cries and lets Sam's hands cover his head and the night cover his body.

*

"I don't know how to help you," Sam says, later, standing in his bedroom with his fingers on the light switch.

"I don't think you can."

"I'd like to, Toby. We could try."

"You don't understand," Toby says.

For something taken, this is what he takes back: Sam's promises and gentleness mix with the sound of the river, filling his mouth and covering his eyes, showing him something secret; something hinted at but never finished: the rip that was always there inside him, pulled-at now and frayed, which he can never mend because, until today, he had never known it was there. He looks for oblivion differently than his brother; quieter, less finally and still concerned always, like every jealous man, about what might be written tomorrow. Sam reaches out and Toby takes him, fingers fisted in his shirt.

He holds Sam's face in both his hands, their bodies straight together like two hands grasping and palms touching, pressing against Sam's rigidity, forcing him over, bringing collapse, falling. The bed holds them: Sam beneath and Toby above, still palms-pressed to Sam's face and kissing him now where before it was only the rough, desperate press of his face against Sam's, almost like an animal. Toby kisses him now and feels Sam shift, opening his thighs, curling his legs round and softening. Sam's hands undo his tie and shirt buttons and pull at the waist of his pants and Toby presses each newly-naked slip of skin -- the curve of his neck, the long tender line of his inner forearm, the rise of his chest and the sharpness of his hip -- to the warmth of Sam's body. He is erect but doesn't realise it; that it is not the point of the exercise or the object of the coupling. Toby wishes, hard and noisily with all the words left in his heart, for subsumation. But as he rocks against Sam he finds pleasure of a kind nudging him, at the edge, where he still remembers how to touch someone else, or how to touch himself. Sam's jeans are open and pulled down a little over his hips, his sweater pushed up over his belly. Toby stops and strokes his fingers over this pale middle; watches Sam buck up against his hand, a little. He kneels beside the bed with Sam's legs open in front of him and Sam's calves touching his upper arms, bends his head to the flatness between hip and belly and, suddenly anxious, Toby tastes this smooth white skin with his tongue and lips. Sam sighs: contentment, more than pleasure; his legs press closer to Toby's shoulders and Toby holds them in his hands, back on his feet.

For something taken, this is what he takes back: Sam's quiet half-words of pleasure, like the whispers of the river to Toby, who has forgotten what they mean; the warmth and weight of a man's arms around him, difficult to bear but pulled back when they move away, because Toby cannot bear the cold; the taste of peace on the wrong side of sleep, moving further from him as he reaches towards it, like the taste of Sam's skin on his tongue.

*

"He was my brother, and I don't think I loved him."

"You loved him. Or you wouldn't be here."

"Here with you?"

Sam smiles. Toby thinks he looks sad as he does so. "Things you do when you're hurting, Toby. They don't have to make sense."

"No."

"You just lost your brother."

"Yes."

"You need to take some time with that."

"I thought you couldn't help me," Toby says, almost smiling.

"Is this helping?" Sam says.

"No," Toby answers, trying again to smile.

"So why are you here?"

Toby wants to say: you are the brother I knew how to love and you were the brother I was sorry to lose. He says nothing.

"Are you sorry he's gone?"

"No."

"You're angry with him?"

"Yes."

"He killed himself, didn't he?"

"Yes." Toby doesn't bother to ask how Sam knows without a word of the truth; they had enough discussions about the choices of death, back when those things seemed important.

"I think maybe you would have been angry with him anyway."

"I've spent long stretches of my life resenting my brother, Sam. This isn't new for me."

"But that he made the choice, that makes it worse?"

"You don't walk away," Toby says, in a whisper. "You don't walk away."

"From life?"

"From his children, his wife, from the work he did."

"He was dying, Toby. This was the sense he made of that. It was his choice."

"No, it wasn't. It stops being your choice."

"Which is why you're here with me, instead of reading your kids bedtime stories, Toby?"

"I missed you."

"Yeah, I know."

"I'm sorry. That it ended the way it did."

"I really thought you had a shot with Andy. That you'd work it out."

"That's why you left?"

"One of the reasons."

Toby wants to ask Sam's opinion of his melancholy, whether that first leave-taking, that first of many, was motivated by some variation of the words _too sad for me_. He says nothing.

"I'm sorry too," Sam says. "I thought it would be better this way."

"Can I stay?" Toby asks, patting the bed with his left hand, trying to make himself clear.

"Of course," Sam says, nodding, very serious. Declarations are moments from his lips.

"Don't make promises if you can't keep them, Sam," Toby says, voice dark with warning, and fear too.

"I'm not making promises, Toby," Sam says, reaching out, curving his hand around Toby's bare forearm. He is starting to smile.

"Don't say it," Toby says, starting to raise his other hand, beginning to turn his head.

"I love you, you idiot."

"Like a big brother?" Toby says, the word forming with difficulty in his mouth, too heavy for his voice, holding too much meaning.

"Like a brother, and my friend, and like a lover too."

Toby no longer finds Sam's fearless effusion amusing, if he ever did. He is now blankly amazed that such things can come from a man's mouth, that nothing in the world seems to frighten Sam, or bring him low.

"Really," Toby says. It is not a question.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"_Why?_"

"It's a simple question, Sam."

"Actually, it's the exact opposite of a _simple_ question, Toby."

"Do you really think it's worth it?"

"Loving you?"

Toby nods, raises his eyes, stares at Sam.

"_Yes_."

"You sound like him, like David."

"I always wanted a big brother."

"Yes," Toby says.

"Let's take a walk," Sam says, smiling.

"Now?"

"Yeah. By the river, up and down. Get the blood flowing."

"You got a speech due?"

"I missed it. Walking with you. I didn't realise until now."

"Okay," Toby says.

"Put your clothes on."

"Yes, Congressman."

"You're sorry you never got to sleep with a second member of Congress, aren't you?"

"Yeah, 'cause they're all such foxes."

Sam laughs, and touches Toby's hand as he retreats to the bathroom. They are going for a walk in New York at three in the morning, but Sam wants to splash some water on his face, do a quick turn with his toothbrush, straighten further his straight dark hair. Toby watches him go, then reaches for his discarded shirt and pants; starts to get dressed.

*

Sam remembers falling in love with him. And as he remembers thinks that it might not be so inappropriate that Toby has come seeking him following the loss of his brother, because the whisper of the same loss five years ago was what did it; as David Ziegler came to earth, Sam began to rise in his place.

He imagined, that evening, after the signal, during the speech, before the shooting, that love was written onto his face; big letters, scrawled happily in a script unlike either of their own. Sam remembers smiling at other men that way, and at Lisa a few times, at Josh many more - like joy was moving his muscles, that devotion was asking to be given. He gave it to Toby. And at the time, of course, Toby hadn't known what he had received, was too tightly held in the twist of relief and pride that formed his reaction to the signal. Sam hadn't understood the situation with Toby's brother - why everything was secret and difficult and unnatural - but Toby's emotion seemed clear enough, and Sam wanted his smile to reach his boss across the space between the two balconies, to touch him on the shoulder. When Sam's signal has relayed to Josh and then to Leo, Toby looks back up at him and nods. His face is set and would have seemed blank to Sam this time last year, but here in the middle of their second year together, Sam can read more than gratitude. He falls in love with a nod and the barest hint of a smile and Toby's long exhalation, leaning on the balcony with his arms crossed and his shoulders broad and black under the dull fluorescents. He seems like a verse on complication made flesh; Sam can see unfinished phrases in the slow blink of his eyes and contradictory declarations in the fall and rise of his chest. Though he is sure his boss would disapprove, Toby makes Sam into a poet; a singer for the heart of this strange man and the writer of a legacy that promises to be written one day, when the other battles are done.

Nothing happens in the next nights but fear over again for Toby and all the rest of them too, as though God thought they should all learn that particular lesson together, and give Toby a refresher course. They sat close without touching at the hospital and they didn't need words then. When Josh is pronounced safe they hugged, and Sam felt Toby's fingers fisting in his jacket and held him closer. By the midterms Sam had kissed him and at Thanksgiving they were able to mock Josh and CJ without saying anything out loud, and watch the football at the same time. When Galileo disappears Toby is tense and at the opening of the new year he is angry when Sam asks about Ann Stark in gentle, insecure words. It takes more than beer to repair what Toby allows into the GDC speech and Sam's heart breaks on words like 'friendship' and 'honesty' and again when Toby's softness gives him an apology without words and Toby curls around him in their bed. Toby laughs after the State of the Union is done and Sam won't let himself cry after the phonecall from his mom and on a dark night in early April, Toby comes home silent and broken in a way which Sam doesn't understand, and fucks him into the bed without a word of explanation. When the explanations have come Sam holds out his hand and Toby takes it, partners for this thing which could be the end. When they get a reprieve Sam is happier than Toby seems to be, counting it as one more tick in the success column, rather than one less instance of their allotted luck. They stay together as best they can, for a while. Until California beckons to Sam and shows him something that might be better; something he hadn't thought he wanted until then. It turns out that Andrea offered Toby the same thing, and there was no breaking, no cessation of love, only a change of paths. That they were both walking into dead-ends is, Sam thinks, just unlucky. All that is needed is a re-tracing of their steps.

*

"You okay?" Sam asks, worrying, needling.

"Yeah."

"Not thinking about ... you know, jumping in?"

"Wouldn't you save me, Sam?" Toby says, managing a smile, slipping back into teasing with an ease which, as he thinks about it, does not surprise him. Sam is much too easy.

"Of course. Although, you know I've never been much of swimmer. So, it might end up the two of us at the bottom of the river."

"Doesn't sound so bad."

"Toby."

"I'm fine, Sam. Save your questions."

"No, you're not."

"No. But I'm not ... I'm not going to jump."

"I _could_ save you, you know. I have the skills."

"Yeah. For the times your boat has sunk."

"Exactly," Sam says, turning his head, grinning at him. Sam's arm brushes his; a little skip in their steps, small fellowship.

"I have thought ... before. You know." Toby says, after a few minutes.

Sam says nothing. Toby imagines that he is not surprised.

"Not seriously, not really. Just ... for the peace."

"What did you do?" Sam asks, voice very quiet.

Toby shakes his head. "I don't know. Nothing, I guess. Drank. Wrote. Whatever. You find something that stops you, something more important than the pain. You think about what happens tomorrow."

"He must have been depressed, Toby," Sam says, softly.

Toby wants to turn to him and say: and what do think I am? but does not. He keeps walking, and listens to the river. The river whispers, darkly full of friendship and stories of brothers he loved better than his own. It calls him 'betrayer', it calls him 'failure', it calls him 'pervert', it sings kaddish as it has been in his heart these last days, unformed and unsung. And as he listens Toby realises that the river is not mourning for David, but for him and his invisible, impossible, unwritten legacy. And that the prayer is backwards: not looking for life, but wrapping death and the promise of death around him like a coat. He looks down at the ink-like river and imagines throwing in his notebook, his pages, his wallet and photographs, the words in his soul. Perhaps the river knows how to write the words better than he does and though no-one could read them, they would always be there. He allows a small, sour smile at that: backwards again.

Sam's hand brushes his in the dark as they are walking, cuff to cuff, and Toby reaches; lets his fingers find the comfort his heart cannot. Sam's hand is warm and dry and holds his easily, never quite like a brother. Sam's jumpy, skip-like walk which belongs to the light and not the blind evening of life which is all that Toby can give him, slows and calms; matches to Toby's heavier steps. His presence is a stiff pair of shoulders and the quiet whisper of his clothes as he moves and the sound of his breathing, sweet like his voice. Sam stops them by the river's edge. They lean over the rail and watch the black life of the Hudson roll and curve beneath them. Sam's hand is resting in the long hollow of Toby's back, fingers stroking slightly. And Toby wants, desperately, to turn into Sam's body and be buried there, in the silence, by the river.


End file.
